Advertising on the web is here to stay, and that’s a fact of life. Otherwise, there’d be a whole lot less free services and content for us to read. In exchange for free access to a whole lot of websites, we have to accept that most of these websites will have ads.

Without a doubt, the most successful ad service on the web is Google’s AdWords-AdSense programmes. Advertisers buy ad space via keywords and sites using the AdWords program while web publishers sell ad space on their web pages through the AdSense program. This is a normal set-up for most advertising services but what makes Google’s offering very special is that their ads are primarily text-based—no annoying graphical animated pop-ups that drive web surfers crazy—and that their program tries to match the ads to the web page’s content.

This is a vast win-win situation for everyone involved. The web surfers are not annoyed by the ads as much and may even find some ads useful because it’s relevant to the page they’re reading. Advertisers get more bang for the buck because their ads are more targeted resulting to a higher conversion rate. Finally, Google, and especially the web publishers, earn money to help support their site operations without being obtrusive to their visitors. Google’s advertising program is so successful, in fact, that of the $10.6B in revenues that Google earned in 2006, 99% of that is derived from advertising. (Reference)

But I don’t consider Google’s AdWords-AdSense the best kind of web advertising there is. For me, I think that Coudal Partners’ ad network The Deck is the best I’ve seen in the industry. Check out their page to read the details, but essentially, advertisers can buy any of 18 ad spots for $5,500 per month consisting of a 120x90-pixel graphic and an accompanying 75-character-maximum text blurb. These ads are rotated across 21 sites whose combined viewership reaches several million impressions (page views) per month. What makes this attractive to advertisers is the fact that The Deck ad is the only ad readers see on every page of these sites.

The Deck ad network is also quite an exclusive club. If you’re a web publisher, you don’t apply to join their select group, they select you instead. And if you’re an advertiser, they won’t accept you unless they’ve tried your products. As they say on their page, “We’re picky about the advertising we’ll accept. We won’t take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service.“ Now that’s truly a win-win situation for everyone involved.

(Some of you might be interested or amused to learn that Text Link Ads, possibly the second most popular ad service among Pinoy bloggers after Google, is a perennial advertiser on The Deck.)

As I said, I consider The Deck to be the best ad network there is. I’ve been regularly reading a few of the websites in their network from several years back and that’s how I came across this ad network. I was surprised when I asked Rico and Abe about it a few months ago and they professed not to know much about it.

Assuming that The Deck’s ad revenue is distributed equally among the sites and that Coudal Partners gets only a 5% cut (they are one of the 21 sites after all), each site gets a nice $4,500 every month. That’s almost the average salary that a web designer/developer in the United States gets! Many of their member sites are personal blogs and The Deck gives them a nice tidy sum just for blogging. Isn’t that great?

I seriously believe that such a business model is something that we can adapt to the Philippine setting. The ad network will group together some of the most infuential Pinoy websites and will target local advertisers. Factoring in relative web traffic and cost-of-living, I think that a monthly rate of 25,000 pesos is a good enough figure for a local version of The Deck. Now that’s something local bloggers might be interested in looking at.